The catalog project is a work in two versions. Each installment uses texts on contemporary art published in the preceding calendar year to create both a print and an audio work. Playing off of the conventions of current conceptual writing practices, none of the material is written by me. My intervention lies solely in the selection and re-composition of appropriated text. The first installment used only descriptions of artworks culled from press releases and exhibitions. For the second installment, the source material was expanded to include blogs, art-market analyses, and editorials on art. When I selected a publication or section thereof, I took every text that had been published in the preceding year, so as to neither filter nor target my content. All artist names, titles, exhibition titles and venue names were first erased from the text. The texts were then cut up, shuffled, and recomposed. The first version is a 110-page long script, printed according to the conventions of a film script, which was turned into an audio recording using text-to-speech software. The second version is a 565-page long novel, with 365 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue.

The epilogue was composed from around 73 different interviews of artists and curators, all of which were fused together to create a 90 page long interview of an absurdly protean artist. The epilogue was also used to create an accompanying audio work, titled Catalog version 2.2: Q and A. Actors Jennifer Grace and Nathan Dame played the two voices of the text, the former shifting her tone and voice throughout the 4 hour long recording.

Different versions of this project were shown at Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt; GAK, Bremen; and Simone Subal Gallery, New York.

The Lazy Machine